Broken Arrow

[ESokoloff]

1.2 B gone up in smoke.

Apparently only one crew member sustain minor injuries.

[notacop]

Boy, that's more expensive than a whole passal of new bikes...opps, sorry 'bout the plane!

Hope the pilots don't have compressed spines columns from the rapid ejections.

[lawnchairboy]

guess they will be parting the remains out at the "B2 boneyard"

[velomoto]

The more complex the plane the more likely it'll fail... I've always been a follower of Murphy. Guess that's part of the rationalization for riding an air cooled boxer in a day where water cooled twins and fours can pump out amazing amounts of power!

 

I'm just glad to hear the flight crew survived the crash!

[ESokoloff]

I was actually thinking the opposite.

Given that this program is around 20 years old, this is the first crash of the 21 planes that I know of.

[russell_bynum]

Thank God the pilots got out and nobody on the ground was hurt.

[smiller]

The more complex the plane the more likely it'll fail...

Probably true on the low end, but not so much when you have $1.2 billion to spend on each copy.

[russell_bynum]

The more complex the plane the more likely it'll fail...

Probably true on the low end, but not so much when you have $1.2 billion to spend on each copy.

 

Nope. The more parts you add, the lower your Mean Time Before Failure.

 

You try to design so that you've got redundancy and fail-safes, but at the end of the day...the more parts, the more likely something's going to fail.

[Twisties]

That equals something like 6000 houses.

[Matts_12GS]

That equals something like 6000 houses.

What are you thinking? 1.2Bn is only 2,500 really nice houses

[Francois_Dumas]

When I made a good-humored joke about the price of these things (and YOUR tax money) I had a whole forum fall over me...... so I'll refrain from comment

[Dick]

Thanks.

[Twisties]

That equals something like 6000 houses.

What are you thinking? 1.2Bn is only 2,500 really nice houses

 

 

Silly me, I was just thinking average houses (National Median Price for fourth qtr 2007 = $206,200). Really, looking back on that post, I can't imagine what I was thinking.... ...

 

 

 

On another note: Imagine if one of every 21 737's went down every 20 years.... very roughly speaking... we'd have had something like 240 of those crash by now.

[Matts_12GS]

Silly me, I was just thinking average houses (National Median Price for fourth qtr 2007 = $206,200). Really, looking back on that post, I can't imagine what I was thinking.... ...

See, never, ever settle for average, don't you think more of yourself than that?

[philbytx]

Yup! It's amazing what using OPM will do for your mindset

 

Quote

 

On another note: Imagine if one of every 21 737's went down every 20 years.... very roughly speaking... we'd have had something like 240 of those crash by now.

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

The more complex the plane the more likely it'll fail...

Probably true on the low end, but not so much when you have $1.2 billion to spend on each copy.

 

Nope. The more parts you add, the lower your Mean Time Before Failure.

 

You try to design so that you've got redundancy and fail-safes, but at the end of the day...the more parts, the more likely something's going to fail.

 

True dat, but the whole point of redundancy is to mitigate the consequences of any one failure; if you've got one attitude control computer spitting out random numbers, and the three others overriding it, it counts as a failure, but you can still finish your mission and make it home without incident. So instead of a "DANGER - EJECT EJECT EJECT" situation, it's more like "NOTICE - CHECK WINDSHIELD WASHER FLUID LEVEL."

 

Anyone hear why this one crashed? They run out of washer fluid?

[Twisties]

OPM ?

[smiller]

True dat, but the whole point of redundancy is to mitigate the consequences of any one failure;

And that was my point exactly. I was considering 'failure' to mean a mission-affecting issue, not any failure of any minor subsystem. In that way having $1.2 billion per copy to spend on engineering/testing/system redundancy/etc. may well increase the functional reliability of the aircraft over that of something much less mechanically complex. Which has the greater likelihood of completing a flight from Texas to Torrey without incident, a B-2 or a Cessna 150? (Of course landing when you get there is another matter...)

 

It will be fascinating to learn the specific cause of the crash. And of course I'm sure there are a lot of people at Northrop who are also very interested in that topic...

[Agent_Orange]

If you think the cost of a B 2 is 'only' 1.2 billion, I gotta little news for ya. Try 2.1 billion +.

 

 

The cost of the B-2 program in 1994 dollars was reported at $737 million per plane; however, the total cost of the program with development, spares, and facilities averaged over $2.1 billion per plane as of 1997 according to the B-2 program office.[3]

 

 

 

And it really is closer to 3 billion +.

[casticus]

Aren't they techinically priceless now? If the production run of them has ended (I am assuming it has) then you can't put a price sticker on it because now we only have 20 and we won't ever have 21 again....

 

They don't restart military production lines after the initial run is over (that I know of).

[Alan D]

OPM = Other Peoples Money

[ghaverkamp]

The cost of the B-2 program in 1994 dollars was reported at $737 million per plane; however, the total cost of the program with development, spares, and facilities averaged over $2.1 billion per plane as of 1997 according to the B-2 program office.

 

It was never a cheap plane. However, it doesn't help the per-plane costs when the output is slashed, leaving the total program costs averaged over a much smaller number of planes.

 

In the future, it would definitely be helpful if major superpowers would collapse before acquisitions of major weapons systems take place.

[steve.foote]

OPM = Other Peoples Money

 

Hmmm, Other Peoples Money = OPM = Opium = . Cooincidence?